Angela Thurman: Bringing NASA-Level Discipline to SME Supply Chains

In a world where supply chain risk feels permanent rather than episodic, most small and mid-sized manufacturers are still trying to manage complex projects with spreadsheets and hope. Angela Thurman built her career in the opposite environment, where failure was measured in spacecraft, not spreadsheets. Today, as founder of Houston-based Thurman Co, she is bringing that level of rigor to organizations that cannot afford a full-time program management office but cannot afford to get it wrong either.

From the Ozarks to NASA: A Foundation Built on Precision

Thurman grew up in northwest Arkansas, in the shadow of the Ozark Mountains and the corporate influence of Walmart. She studied electrical engineering at John Brown University, a small private Christian school where her graduating class included only six electrical engineers.

"It was a very good education," she recalls. "There was no room to hide. One of my professors could tap you on the shoulder and say, come to my office this afternoon, you have an oral exam."

A mentor nudged her into engineering early by mailing her a subscription to Woman Engineer magazine while she was still in high school. That, in turn, led to a summer mission project in Ecuador, where she designed a switching power supply for a shortwave radio station in the Andes. The work caught the attention of NASA Lewis Research Center, now NASA Glenn, in Cleveland.

"I got a job as an electrical engineer for the Power Management and Distribution branch," she says. "We were managing all of the power for the International Space Station."

She was twenty three, a young woman from the South walking into a bullpen full of middle aged men from the Apollo and shuttle era. "They literally would count how many times a day I say y'all," she remembers. Yet she found herself monitoring major subcontractors like TRW and Westinghouse, holding engineers twice her age accountable to schedule and budget.

Learning Project Management at the Source

At NASA, Thurman absorbed project management as a structured discipline. The lab brought in Dr Harold Kerzner, one of the field's most influential voices, to teach project management theory.

"I learned project management under the auspices of Dr. Kerzner," she says. "I did not understand at the time what that would mean for my career, but I certainly do now."

She carried that rigor into telecommunications, managing large fiber builds and uncovering billing discrepancies simply through disciplined tracking. She recalls noticing that fiber splicers were billing twice for the same work, both per splice and per hour. "We were able to make a significant recovery from that contractor because of that attention to detail," she says.

The discovery led to a promotion, supervising a review team of paralegals and law students who examined contracts for technical feasibility, billing accuracy and risk.

A Cross-Industry Toolkit for Complex Projects

Over time, Thurman came to view project management as a portable set of tools rather than a domain-specific function.

"I view project management and the skills that I use as sort of like a toolkit," she explains. "It does not matter if I am applying them to aerospace or telecommunications or oil and gas or software implementation. If you need Waterfall, I have Waterfall. If you need Agile Scrum, I have Scrum. If you need a focus on change management and configuration management, that is in the toolkit too."

In an industry landscape where many projects still miss their objectives due to weak planning, poor stakeholder alignment and limited real time metrics, that toolkit is increasingly essential.

Building Thurman Co: Project Management for High-Stakes Supply Chains

After more than a decade as a subcontracts program manager at Collins Aerospace, where she managed complex third party products for OEM customers like Boeing and Airbus, Thurman reached a turning point when the pandemic hit and Boeing paused production of the 787.

"I found myself looking for a new job," she says. "By that time I had been working from home for six or seven years, I had two little dogs that depended on me, and I did not want a one hour commute each way to support NASA Johnson." When Boeing called for a position that required crossing a bridge she considered "really scary," she walked away.

Instead, in spring 2021, she launched Thurman Co, a technical project management and supply chain consulting firm serving small and medium sized organizations in highly regulated industries such as aerospace, automotive and telecommunications.

"We help small to medium sized organizations with strategic, technical project management to ensure they are doing the right things to keep their projects aligned with their business goals," the company states. Alongside project management as a service, Thurman Co provides contract management systems and supplier management programs typically associated with much larger enterprises.

Transforming Supplier Management With Transparency and Metrics

Thurman's philosophy centers on transparent supplier relationships. "Too often we have a winner takes all mentality," she says. "If we view our supplier relationships as I have to beat them down to get the lowest price, that is not going to help us in the long run, because we need our suppliers to succeed if we are to succeed."

At Collins she helped design supplier capability assessments that examined factors far beyond standard audits. "We would assess them across a wide scale of different factors," she says. "Business continuity, financial capabilities, human resources, engineering. Where there was a variance, we would seek to create an improvement plan and then we would work together to improve their capabilities."

That approach now shapes Thurman Co's supplier management offering, which emphasizes detailed supplier performance reporting and capability and capacity assessments. Key performance indicators include on time delivery, defective parts per million, first pass yield, purchase order response time and partial shipment counts. For more mature suppliers, evaluations extend to process FMEA, design FMEA and capability indices like Cpk.

Even a simple gesture can strengthen relationships. At one supplier, Thurman printed postcards with a photograph of the aircraft their parts supported and added a handwritten thank you.

"The next time I visited, I saw those postcards pinned up at the workstations of all of the operators," she says. "They knew I cared and they appreciated that. It cost almost nothing, but it meant something."

Structured Project Management for an AI-Era Supply Chain

Thurman is also a power user of AI tools, which she treats as accelerators for disciplined project work. "I probably use five to ten AI tools every day," she says. "Today I have used Google Notebook LM, ChatGPT, Canva, Airtable's AI and Gamma, and it is only 11:30."

For SMEs facing enterprise-level supply chain risk without enterprise-level staffing, that combination of rigor and augmentation is increasingly necessary.

Large OEMs require consistent supplier performance management and high quality systems. Smaller firms that want to serve regulated industries must meet the same bar, even if they cannot justify an internal PMO. Thurman Co fills that gap.

"We come alongside your team and advocate for your organization so that the project and the engagement succeed and the whole team wins," the company states.

In today's volatile supply chain landscape, NASA-level discipline delivered with a personal touch is no longer a luxury. It may be the prerequisite for competing at all.